Black Defendants Research Articles

When Avoidance Backfires: Interracial Officer-Citizen Dyads and the Consequences for Fleeing Suspects

Research suggests that Black citizens who experience an elevated fear of law enforcement frequently engage in avoidance strategies, such as fleeing, when confronted by police. There is also strong reason to speculate that this avoidance behavior commonly transpires when the police officer is White. Problematically, this avoidance strategy may place these citizens at an increased risk for officer use of force as the police seek to subdue fleeing suspects. The current study uses data drawn from the Evaluation of Less-Lethal Technologies on Police Use-of-Force project and a series of logistic regression equations and mediation analysis to determine whether Black suspects are more apt to flee from White police officers than other officer-suspect racial dyads and, because of this fleeing behavior, have a greater likelihood of experiencing force. After controlling for a variety of salient factors, results indicate support for this scenario. Policy implications are discussed. Plain language title When Avoidance Backfires: Mixed-Race Officer-Citizen Contacts and What Happens When Suspects Run From Police

Community Policing Policies and the Use of Lethal Force: Revisiting the Effects of Policing Policies on Police Department Organizational Culture

ABSTRACT In this research, we examine whether community policing policies (CPPs), community policing training for new recruits or regular community policing training, impact who is killed by a law enforcement officer in terms of the victim’s race. We seek to present one of the few empirical studies of evidence on whether community policing has the potential to address racial disparities. Using a unique dataset and multinomial logistic models, we found that the presence of community policing policies does not reduce the relative likelihood of law enforcement officers using lethal force against minority citizens. However, we did find evidence that white police officers who received at least eight hours of community policing training were negatively associated with using lethal force against black suspects. We suggest that strategies to improve the effectiveness of CPPs are necessary, and these efforts will contribute to improving the perceived legitimacy of policing agencies and addressing the disproportionate killings of minority residents.

Fines and Fees in Flux: Exploring Changes in Municipal Violation Sentencing after Court Reform

Monetary sanctions are a ubiquitous part of punishment in the criminal legal system. In recent years, highly publicized events have drawn attention to monetary sanctions at the intersection of poverty, race, and legal system contact. The current study uses Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average models to assess monetary sanction reform legislation in St. Louis, Missouri – where the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2015 Ferguson Report implicated monetary sanctions practices as a contributing to tension between the community and the criminal legal system. We find that white defendants experienced an increase in the average amount of fines received (the punishment portion of the sentence), further, the implementation of the reform (modeled as a step function) was associated with increased fee assessments for those receiving monetary sanctions. Further, racial gaps in total assessments across Black and white residents remained, even as fees for Black defendants declined. Our findings highlight how policies can improve some parts of the criminal legal system yet remain insufficient to fully address their stated goals.

The judicial superego: Implicit egoism, internalized racism, and prejudice in three million sentencing decisions

AbstractI document implicit egoism across 3 million sentencing decisions. In administrative data from the U.S. New Orleans District Attorney's office for 1988–1999 and Chile for 2014–2019, sentences are 8% longer and 2% longer, respectively, when the judge and defendant's first initials match. Name letter effects measure implicit self‐esteem. Faced with ego threat, high self‐esteem individuals punish negatively valenced targets as self‐regulation. In New Orleans, effects are larger for Black defendants labeled by police as “N” rather than “B.” Consistent with recent theoretical models, Black–White sentence differences double for egoist judges, and this effect is especially pronounced among Black judges.

Phenotypic mismatch between suspects and fillers but not phenotypic bias increases eyewitness identifications of Black suspects.

Despite converging evidence that people more closely associate the construct of criminality with Black people who exhibit a more African facial phenotype than Black people who express a more European phenotype, eyewitness researchers have largely ignored phenotypic bias as a potential contributor to the racial disparities in the criminal legal system. If this form of phenotypic bias extends to eyewitness identification tasks, eyewitnesses may be more likely to identify Black suspects with an African rather than European phenotype, regardless of their guilt status. Further, in cases where the witness's description of the perpetrator does not contain phenotypic information, phenotypic mismatch between the suspect and the other lineup members may bias identification decisions toward or against the suspect. If witnesses can use elements of the lineup construction to guide their identification decisions rather than relying on their recognition memory, then the lineup should be deemed unfair due to suspect bias. The current study also investigated lineup presentation method as a procedural safeguard, predicting that that when lineups were presented simultaneously, there would be a significant two-way interaction of phenotypic bias and lineup composition, with a larger simple main effect of phenotypic bias when lineups were suspect-biased (i.e., the fillers were a phenotypic mismatch to the suspect) than when all lineup members shared the same phenotype. We expected that this interaction would be significantly smaller or non-significant for sequential lineups. Participants watched a mock crime video that contained a Black culprit with either a more African phenotype or a less African phenotype before attempting identifications from a photo array that contained a suspect whose phenotype always matched the culprit viewed in the video, but varied in culprit-presence, phenotypic match of the suspect and fillers, and presentation method. Participants did not identify Black suspects with Afrocentric features more often than Black suspects with Eurocentric features. However, witnesses made more identifications of suspects when the fillers did not match the suspect's phenotype compared to when all lineup members possessed similar phenotypic features. In sum, phenotypic bias did not influence our participant-witnesses' identification decisions, nor interact with lineup composition and lineup presentation type to affect identifications of suspects, suggesting that phenotypic bias may be less influential in match-to-memory tasks than other types of legal decision-making (e.g., determining guilt and sentencing). However, the suggestiveness created by failing to match fillers' phenotypes to the suspect's phenotype can be avoided with proper attention to fair lineup construction.

Does Racial Bias Explain the Black-White Sentencing Gap across U.S. Courts?

Abstract It is widely speculated that prejudicial attitudes and implicit biases are fundamental to understanding racial disparities in criminal punishment. Yet surprisingly little research links measures of racial bias to data on criminal court decision-making. This article fills this gap by combining multiple aggregate measures of implicit and explicit racial bias with data from U.S. federal courts to examine whether racial disparities in sentencing are associated with prejudicial attitudes within the surrounding court context. We find no evidence that racial biases, whether implicit or explicit, significantly influence racial sentencing disparities across U.S. district courts. Nor do we find evidence that racial biases yield greater sentencing disparities in supplementary analyses using county-level court data. We do, however, find suggestive evidence that the prosecutorial application of mandatory minimums is sensitive to the level of racial bias within a court’s jurisdiction. Specifically, we find that Black defendants are disproportionately charged in districts with greater explicit racial animus.

Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to the Fox News Channel

Abstract Local exposure to conservative news causes judges to impose harsher criminal sentences. Our evidence comes from an instrumental variable analysis, where randomness in television channel positioning across localities induces exogenous variation in exposure to the Fox News Channel. These treatment data on news viewership are taken to outcome data on almost seven million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the years 2005–17. Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, and the effect is stronger for Black defendants and for drug-related crimes. We can rule out changes in the behaviour of police, prosecutors or potential offenders as significant drivers. Consistent with changes in voter attitudes as the key mechanism, the effect on sentencing harshness is observed for elected (but not appointed) judges. Fox News viewership also increases self-reported beliefs about the importance of drug crime as a social problem.

Consistency of Supervisory Interpretations of Stop-Search Justification in London: A Vignette Assessment Analysis

Research QuestionDo police supervisors reach different conclusions about the legality of a decision to stop and search in survey vignettes using similar facts with the ethnicity of subjects described as either black or white?DataWe utilize a vignette survey design, presenting 15 real-world stop and search examples from within the South Basic Command Unit policing area to 118 frontline uniformed supervisors (Sergeants and Inspectors) in the Metropolitan Police Service of London.MethodsWe introduce a randomised characteristic assignment of the ethnicity of the subject featured in the vignette to compare officer decision-making when the suspect is black or white. Using both Likert scale and free-text responses, a combination of descriptive statistics, inferential methods, and text mining is applied to the survey data.FindingsWe found no substantive difference in the justification of stop and search powers by officers between white suspects and black suspects. We did find substantial variability in supervisor assessments of whether vignettes provided sufficient legal grounds for conducting a stop and search.ConclusionsWithin the limits of the methodology, we conclude that there is no racial disparity in perceptions of legal thresholds for conducting searches across a range of circumstances. We must also conclude that there is a substantial range of opinion regarding different specific circumstances that are understood to provide a threshold of sufficient evidence to search.

Federal criminal sentencing: race-based disparate impact and differential treatment in judicial districts

Race-based inequity in federal criminal sentencing is widely acknowledged, and yet our understanding of it is far from complete. Inequity may arise from several sources, including direct bias of courtroom actors and structural bias that produces racially disparate impacts. Irrespective of these sources, inequity may also originate from different loci within the federal system. We bring together the questions of the sources and loci of inequity. The purpose of our study is to quantify race-based disparate impact and differential treatment at the national level and at the level of individual federal judicial districts. We analyze over one-half million sentencing records publicly available from the United States Sentencing Commission database, spanning the years 2006 to 2020. At the system-wide level, Black and Hispanic defendants receive average sentences that are approximately 19 months longer and 5 months longer, respectively. Demographic factors and sentencing guideline elements account for nearly 17 of the 19 months for Black defendants and all five of the months for Hispanic defendants, demonstrating the disparate impact of the system at the national level. At the individual district level, even after controlling for each district’s unique demographics and implementation of sentencing factors, 14 districts show significant differences for minoritized defendants as compared to white ones. These unexplained differences are evidence of possible differential treatment by judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys.

Can Racial Diversity among Judges Affect Sentencing Outcomes?

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

Downstream Effects of Frayed Relations: Juror Race, Judgment, and Perceptions of Police

Building on research demonstrating significant differences in how Black and White Americans view law enforcement, this study assesses how those differential views shape potential jurors’ decision-making in the context of a federal drug conspiracy case in which the primary evidence against the defendant is provided by an FBI agent and an informant cooperating with the agent. A sample of 649 Black and White jury-eligible U.S. citizens were exposed to the case, in which a Black defendant is being tried, and where the informant-witness race (Black or White) was varied. Participants determined verdict, evaluated evidence, and completed additional measures. Results indicated that Black participants were significantly less likely to convict than White participants, especially in the White informant condition; rated the law enforcement witness as less credible, and viewed police more negatively across three composite measures. Exploratory analysis of how juror race and gender interacted indicates Black women largely drove racial differences in verdicts. Perceptions of police legitimacy mediated the relationship between juror race and verdict choice. We conclude that it is critical that citizens are not prevented from being seated on juries due to skepticism about police, given the risk of disproportionate exclusion of Black potential jurors. The legal processes relevant to juror excusals need to be reconsidered to ensure that views of police, rooted in actual experience or knowledge about the problems with fair and just policing, are not used to disproportionately exclude persons of color, or to seat juries overrepresented by people who blindly trust police.

Introduction, Summary, Questions for the Future

Introduction, Summary, Questions for the Future

Should Algorithms that Predict Recidivism Have Access to Race?

AbstractRecent studies have shown that recidivism scoring algorithms like COMPAS have significant racial bias: Black defendants are roughly twice as likely as white defendants to be mistakenly classified as medium- or high-risk. This has led some to call for abolishing COMPAS. But many others have argued that algorithms should instead be given access to a defendant's race, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is likely to improve outcomes. This approach can involve either establishing race-sensitive risk thresholds, or distinct racial ‘tracks’. Is there a moral difference between these two approaches? We first consider Deborah Hellman's view that the use of distinct racial tracks (but not distinct thresholds) does not constitute disparate treatment since the effects on individuals are indirect and does not rely on a racial generalization. We argue that this is mistaken: the use of different racial tracks seems both to have direct effects on and to rely on a racial generalization. We then offer an alternative understanding of the distinction between these two approaches—namely, that the use of different cut points is to the counterfactual comparative disadvantage, ex ante, of all white defendants, while the use of different racial tracks can in principle be to the advantage of all groups, though some defendants in both groups will fare worse. Does this mean that the use of cut points is impermissible? Ultimately, we argue, while there are reasons to be skeptical of the use of distinct cut points, it is an open question whether these reasons suffice to make a difference to their moral permissibility.

Changes in the own group bias across immediate and delayed recognition tasks

Face recognition is biased in favour of in-group identity, particularly strongly for race or ethnicity but to some extent also for sex and age. This ‘own group bias’ (OGB) can have profound implications in practical settings, with incorrect identification of black suspects by white witnesses constituting 40% of criminal exonerations investigated by the Innocence Project. Although authors have offered several explanations for the OGB in face recognition, there is little consensus, apart from the acknowledgement that the bias must reflect perceptual learning history. One matter that is not currently clear is whether the bias occurs at encoding, or at retrieval from memory. We report an experiment designed to tease out bias at encoding, versus bias at retrieval. Black and white South African participants encoded 16 target faces of both the same and other race and gender, and attempted immediately afterward to match the target faces to members of photograph arrays that either contained or did not contain the targets. After a further delay, they attempted to identify the faces they had encoded from memory. Results showed a strong crossover OGB in the delayed matching task, but an asymmetrical OGB at retrieval (only white participants showed the OGB). Further investigation of recognition performance, considering only images correctly matched in the delayed matching task, showed a narrowly non-significant OGB at retrieval, but the investigation was likely not sufficiently powered to discover the effect, if it exists. Significance: We demonstrate the presence of a crossover OGB in face recognition in a sample of black and white South Africans in a delayed matching task (a measure of encoding). Our findings show that the OGB may change rapidly. In the present study, the OGB took a crossover form at retrieval immediately after encoding, but was asymmetrical when assessed shortly afterwards. We used a novel approach for disentangling effects at encoding and at retrieval, but do not provide clear evidence to distinguish whether the OGB is a failure of encoding or of memory retrieval.

The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Reviewed by: The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells Frank Towers (bio) The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. Jonathan Daniel Wells. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1568587523. 368 pp., cloth, $30.00. In recent years, historians have produced a wave of studies on the kidnapping and reenslavement of African Americans before the Civil War. Richard Bell, Erica Dunbar, Caleb McDaniel, Adam Rothman, and Joshua Rothman among others have shed light on the cruelty, pervasiveness, and legal complexity of kidnapping. They have also told stories of heroic resistance against the depraved pursuit of profit through stealing Northern Blacks from their homes to sell them in Southern slave markets. Adding to this scholarship, Jonathan Wells’s gripping history of kidnapping in 1830s New York exposes the proslavery underbelly of America’s largest city. At its core, The Kidnapping Club is a story of the battle for freedom in the ante-bellum North, a section that despite its ban on slavery denied African Americans basic civil liberties. Led by “the indomitable” Black activist David Ruggles, Black New Yorkers waged a long struggle against kidnappers and their powerful allies in local government. Wells argues that white New York’s complicity in kidnapping went beyond a few corrupt cops and judges. Wall Street financiers facilitated kidnapping to appease Southern slave owners, whose cotton comprised one of the most valuable commodities traded through New York. Because of this obeisance to the South, “it sometimes seemed that the entire city, knowing that its richness and supremacy depended on Southern slavery, was more interested in reassuring slaveholders than in protecting the basic human rights of its Black residents” (5). The Kidnapping Club begins by backgrounding the growth of New York as a gathering place for African Americans as well as the center of American finance and commerce, which drew much of its capital from trading slave-produced cotton. Black New Yorkers lived under a system of “strict racial segregation” that affected “nearly every aspect” of their lives (27). To thrive in a city that tried to [End Page 106] suppress them, they built their own businesses and institutions such as schools, churches, orphanages, and newspapers such as Freedom’s Journal, which exposed racial injustices. Preying on this growing community was a ring of kidnappers whose key players included police marshal and notorious Democratic Party brawler Isaiah Rynders, who worked with Southern slave traders to identify suspected fugitives; police officers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel Nash, who arrested suspected freedom seekers from the South; and City Recorder Richard Riker, who routinely ruled in favor of slave catchers in cases of alleged fugitives. These officials abused their authority by condemning Black defendants to enslavement despite compelling evidence to the contrary brought by Ruggles and his allies. The kidnappers had close ties to Tammany Hall—the informal name for the city’s branch of the Democratic Party—which relied on patronage from Wall Street businessmen to fund its campaigns. Helping Southern slave traders not only earned these men cash bribes and bounties, it also “cemented the economic relationship between cotton growers and Manhattan brokers” (45). To combat these powerful foes, Ruggles worked with other abolitionists to organize the New York Committee of Vigilance in 1835. The committee spread word when slave catchers were in town, gave sanctuary for freedom seekers, provided legal defense for accused fugitives, and waged a public pressure campaign against the kidnappers. Leading these efforts, Ruggles routinely risked his personal safety to confront police and rescue victims. This outspoken leadership made Ruggles a target of the kidnappers who physically assaulted him and tried to frame him for a crime. Meanwhile, Ruggles’s combativeness made him enemies within the Committee of Vigilance. Losing his eyesight and exhausted by fighting friends as well as foes, Ruggles left New York in 1841. Around this time, the kidnapping club went into decline. An 1840 law requiring jury trials in fugitive cases took away corrupt judges’ power to convict. Two years later, Riker died and Boudinot declared bankruptcy. Instead of ending the story at this point, Wells moves to the...

The role of social desirability and establishing nonracist credentials on mock juror decisions about Black defendants.

Recently, experimental work on racial bias in legal settings has diverged from real-world field data demonstrating racial disparities, instead often producing null or potential overcorrection effects favoring Black individuals over White individuals. We explored the role of social desirability in these counterintuitive effects and tested whether allowing participants to establish nonracist moral credentials increased their willingness to convict a Black defendant. We predicted that establishing nonracist moral credentials would increase convictions of Black defendants-especially for participants likely to harbor racial bias and external motivation to control it. In two experiments, we randomly assigned White mock jurors (Study 1: N = 1,018; Study 2: N = 1,253) to establish nonracist moral credentials by acquitting a Black defendant in an initial case, acquit a White defendant in the same case, or see no prior case. Next, they judged an ambiguous case against a Black (Studies 1 and 2) or White (Study 2) defendant. After choosing verdicts, they provided open-ended guesses of what the study was about. Participants completed measures of explicit prejudice, motivations to control prejudice, and political orientation. Most participants who were asked to judge at least one Black defendant guessed that the study was about racial bias and convicted Black defendants less often than did those who guessed the study was about something else. White participants who established nonracist credentials were significantly more likely to convict Black defendants compared with White participants who did not establish nonracist credentials. Subsequent analyses revealed that conservatives showed this predicted credentialing pattern, whereas liberals did not. Credentialed liberals' convictions of Black defendants remained low; instead, they convicted White defendants more than did noncredentialed liberals. Social desirability plays a clear role in whether White people acquit Black defendants in experiments, which does not align with persistent racial bias in the legal system. Research participants' concern about looking prejudiced might undermine the validity of experiments investigating racial bias in legal settings by artificially inflating pro-Black judgments. The opportunity to credential oneself as nonracist, however, might make conservatives more comfortable making anti-Black legal judgments-whereas credentialed liberals continue to judge Black individuals more favorably than White individuals in legal settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Racial bias in jury selection hurts mock jurors, not just defendants: Testing one potential intervention.

Prosecutors often use race as a basis for excluding Black jurors in cases with Black defendants. The current research tested whether this practice influences juror attitudes (Study 1). It also tested an intervention to prevent racially biased jury selection (Study 2). We predicted that participants exposed to the exclusion of Black prospective jurors would have more negative feelings compared with those who were not exposed to such exclusions (Study 1). We also predicted that participants taking on the role of a prosecutor would be more likely to exclude a Black (vs. White) prospective juror in a case with a Black defendant and that warnings against race-based decisions would result in elaborate race-neutral rationales for the exclusions (Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 228), participants witnessed a simulated jury selection process. For half of the participants, Black jurors were differentially excluded. In Study 2 (N = 298), participants selected between a Black and a White prospective juror for a case with a Black defendant. Exposure to race-based exclusions negatively impacted perceptions of fairness and emotional responses, especially for Black participants (Study 1). Participants were more likely to exclude a Black juror (vs. White juror) but gave race-neutral rationales for their decisions. The effect of race on juror selection was eliminated when participants were warned against using race as a basis for excluding jurors (Study 2). Race-motivated exclusions affect not only Black defendants, by depriving them of their right to a jury of their peers, but also the jurors who remain to deliberate. A warning could be a viable intervention for curbing the influence of race on prosecutorial decisions during jury selection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Does "Jamal" receive a harsher sentence than "James"? First-name bias in the criminal sentencing of Black men.

Using archival and experimental methods, we tested the role that racial associations of first names play in criminal sentencing. We hypothesized that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black names (e.g., Jamal) would receive more punitive sentences than Black defendants with more stereotypically White names (e.g., James). In an archival study, we obtained a random sample of 296 real-world records of Black male prison inmates in Florida and asked participants to rate the extent to which each inmate's first name was stereotypically Black or stereotypically White. We then tested the extent to which racial stereotypicality was associated with sentence length, controlling for relevant legal features of each case (e.g., criminal record, severity of convicted offenses). In a follow-up experiment, participant judges assigned sentences in cases in which the Black male defendant was randomly assigned a more stereotypically Black or White name from our archival study. Controlling for a wide array of factors-including criminal record-we found that inmates with more stereotypically Black versus White first names received longer sentences β = 0.09, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) [0.01, 0.16]: 409 days longer for names 1 standard deviation above versus below the mean on racial stereotypicality. In our experiment, participant judges recommended significantly longer sentences to Black inmates with more stereotypically Black names above and beyond the severity of the charges or their criminal history, β = 0.07, 95% CI [0.02, 0.13]. Our results identify how racial associations with first names can bias consequential sentencing decisions despite the impartial aims of the legal system. More broadly, our findings illustrate how racial biases manifest in distinctions made among members of historically marginalized groups, not just between members of different groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of race on jurors' perceptions of lethal police use of force.

Many highly publicized police use-of-force encounters have recently occurred in the United States. This project primarily explored whether officer, juror, or victim race affects verdicts in trials involving police use of force. Because of recent conflicting research surrounding race and juror decision-making, we conducted an exploratory analysis on the interactive effects of juror, victim, and defendant race. We hypothesized that mock jurors with favorable perceptions of police legitimacy would be less likely to convict an officer charged with manslaughter. Four hundred sixteen (243 women, 170 men, three another gender; 263 White, 50 Asian, 44 Black, 41 Latine, four Native American, 14 another race/ethnicity) jury-eligible community members read a trial transcript involving a police officer charged with manslaughter, in which we manipulated victim and defendant race (Black, White), then rendered a verdict and answered a questionnaire. We found significant effects of police legitimacy and defendant race on verdicts. The main effect was qualified by an interaction between juror race/ethnicity and defendant race. Simple-slope analyses revealed no effect of defendant race for White mock jurors. In comparison, Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) mock jurors were significantly more likely to convict a White than a Black defendant. We also observed significant effects of police legitimacy, defendant race, and victim race on perceptions of the officer's use of force. Our analyses revealed that mock jurors were significantly more punitive when the defendant was White compared with Black, and they perceived the officer's use of force as significantly more excessive when the officer was White or the victim was Black. These effects appear to be driven primarily by BIPOC jurors. Mock jurors with more favorable perceptions of police legitimacy were significantly less likely to convict the officer and viewed his use of force as less excessive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Potential causes of racial disparities in wrongful convictions based on mistaken identifications: Own-race bias and differences in evidence-based suspicion.

We explored whether racial disparities in evidence-based suspicion (i.e., evidence of guilt prior to placement in a lineup) provide a better explanation of racial disparities in exonerations based on eyewitness misidentification than the own-race bias in eyewitness identifications. We predicted that the own-race bias in identification accuracy would be insufficiently large to fully explain the racial disparities in wrongful convictions in cases with mistaken identification. We also predicted that possible racial disparities in the prior probability of suspect guilt before subjecting suspects to the risk of misidentification might better explain racial disparities in wrongful convictions. We conducted a meta-analysis on 54 effect sizes extracted from 16 studies (1,503 individual participants) that tested whether there was an own-race bias in eyewitness identifications using a design that varied the race of both the witnesses and the target faces (Black vs. White). We also constructed two curves that plotted the prior probability of suspect guilt against the posterior probability of guilt: one if an identification were to be obtained for a Black suspect and one if an identification were to be obtained for a White suspect. Participants, irrespective of their race, were better able to discriminate among previously seen White than Black targets. However, the differential accuracy rates for identifications of White versus Black suspects were too small to explain racial disparities in exoneration data on their own. However, racial disparities in evidence that police have against suspects before placing them in an identification procedure would likely explain more of the variance in racial disparities in mistaken identifications that lead to wrongful convictions. Memory errors caused by the own-race bias are likely not the sole or even primary cause of racial disparities in misidentifications; rather, systemic bias in the amount of evidence that police have before placing a suspect at risk of misidentification likely explains more of the variance of racial disparities in wrongful convictions based on mistaken identifications. Requirements for evidence-based suspicion before placing suspects in an identification procedure are needed to prevent systemic racism in mistaken identifications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).